Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Photo Survey, Old Fort Jackson Savannah GA

 

the overhead shot , courtesy Google Earth

       Having visited Savannah half a dozen times over the years it escapes me as to how I managed to have missed a visit to Old Fort Jackson so far. I decided to set that oversight right as I was in the South and would be passing near Savannah on my way back to dreary Michigan. Located just east of Historic Old Savannah the fort is a National Historic Site that is run and maintained by the Coastal Heritage Society  who also run several other museums in the Savannah area (all of which are well worth a visit).  If you are planning on attending do try to visit between October and may as the summers in Savannah are absolutely brutal.

New to nobody but me, Pegasus Great War French Infantry

 

the front of the box
 
       At the request of The Housemartin I went looking for figures to represent the French in Madagascar at the time of Operation Ironclad. After examining options he picked the Pegasus WW1 French infantry set. To make enough troops to fill out his OOB I would need two boxes (there being forty figures in each box). I ordered these through Michigan Toy Soldier and had them in hand within the week. These figures are cast in a medium soft brown plastic that took detail very well. The figures display almost no flash and very little by way of mold lines. The only thing that gives me any reservation is that several of the figures are cast in multiple parts and will require gluing together, having dealt with Pegasus kits in the past I anticipate no problems but it does add an additional bit of work that the old Airfix and Revell kits did not demand.

GAMING UPDATE 29OCT20 1900hrs

 As the title says, we will be gaming this Thursday at my place at 1900hrs

Monday, October 26, 2020

Photo Survey; Fort Loudon, Tennessee


courtesy of Google Earth we have a top-down view of the fort

     I recently had a chance to travel to the state of Tennessee and take in the glorious weather and the very well reconstructed Fort Loudoun. The park has an excellent museum and a friendly and well-versed staff. Built in 1756 as a trading post dealing with the Cherokee Nation it was the scene of a successful siege by the Cherokee who ended up in possession of the fort and it's twelve cannon. There is an excellent Wikipedia article here. This fort cleverly encloses the high ground that would otherwise overlook its interior thus avoiding the problems that Ticonderoga and Mackinac had when they were taken by opponents that captured hills looking down into those forts.

but once terrain lines have been added we can see that the regular trace of he fort is a carefully placed to take advantage of the hill to the northeast

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Nice New Buildings from Renedra

        I happened across these at Michigan Toy Soldier today. I don't know if they are new, but they are new to me so here they are. A series of 28mm Dark/Middle ages buildings that will happily stretch into the early modern era without too much effort. They are solidly cast in a medium gray plastic and nicely detailed, they will be a breeze to assemble. Priced at $8.00US they are very affordable and should paint up easily with the deeply incised details. Sorry about the cello-wrap in the pictures, but I have seventy or so 28mm buildings so I passed on buying these and snapped photos at the store. They have that "just right" feel, large enough to match well with the miniatures but small enough that they don't dominate the landscape. I would consider these an excellent purchase.


 

 
 

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

The Joy of Styrene

 

       So, I'm back at my Irish Dark Ages figures intending to finish off the first box as lightly-armed skirmishers and I will dedicate the next box to some close-ranked spearmen that can double as Welsh in a pinch. Before I even started I got the itch, that certain itch I suffer from whenever I'm dealing with plastic figures; the modification itch! I just knew that I couldn't build these as "out of the box" figures; they would need some cutting-up and new bits. For starters I wanted to add some archers to the mix, no, none of those deadly longbows from a few centuries later; just some run of the mill lads with bows. To this end I dug out one of the boxes of "donor bits" that I had placed aside when I had built some minis a few years back, the Gripping Beast Arab Light Cavalry box. I had built these as a largely spear-armed unit so there were plenty of spare arms holding bows still available. 

Friday, October 2, 2020

The relatively quick follow up on the Jacobite post.

 So I managed to get the canons put together, building this with MDF is always an interesting trick and the more fiddly the item, the more I think people should not make the item out of mdf, but people keep making them and I keep ending up with them so here are the canon builds.  

Third Quarter 2020AD

        Time for a look back at what I have accomplished (or failed to accomplish!) in the last three months. As the world began to open up I spent a less time in the workshop and thus my total number of postings fell to fifty-two posts from the previous high of seventy-six. This was accompanied by a reduction in page visits to 26, 028 for a daily average of 289. I gained two followers. 

        As far as the content of the posts go I did one book review, three figure-set reviews and completed six after-action reports. During this period I completed three model aircraft which were covered by corresponding posts. I did a step-by-step photo tutorial on how I rigged my 1/350th scale galleons. For once in a very long while I resisted the urge to produce a large terrain project and confined my creative energies to scratchbuilding ships and converting figures. At the request of The Housemartin I scratchbuilt a 1/200th scale Dauntless class light cruiser and two A Class destroyers for his Operation Ironclad campaign. I undertook to convert six Dark Ages Irish into 18th century Scots just because I love converting plastic figures. Following along in that vein I built thirty Great War German Infantry, most of which were subject to conversion/customization, some of it rather radical, as well as building a Wex Flammenwurfer and T-Gewehr to equip them with. To provide them with an opponent I scratchbuilt a 1/56th scale MK IV British tank. Stepping down a size I painted a 15mm Stargrunt Neu Swabian League force consisting of eleven vehicles and one hundred infantry.

       Realizing the dual facts that I won't live forever and that my interests have shifted radically I sorted through The Vault and identified a large number of plastic model kits that I simply won't ever build. I placed a few of these on a tab entitled "Better Than Ebay" and will add to that as time goes by. I had to admit to myself that if I've been hauling this stuff around since 1979 without getting any appreciable amount of them built I'm not likely to find myself suddenly shifting focus and going back to finescale modelling. 

        Enough of that for now, back to the workshop!

                  Everybody stay healthy, stay happy and keep rolling sixes!

Thursday, October 1, 2020

And now for something COMPLETELY Different ... The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745!

 So periodically, A certain website where people go to buy and sell all manner of things awards free money to spend on their website (quarterly).  I used my free money this time two buy two things.  A funky chain saw and this.  

The name of the manufacturer is WoFun games.  They are from Romania and sold in the U.S. by a company called Ravens Banner Games out of Texas.  They have a range of periods besides the 45 including Texas War for Independence, Ancients for Romans, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians and Persians including early and late, The sets are made in either 18mm or 28mm.  Perter Dennis is the artists behind these and Andy Callan writes most of the rule sets.  These are the same system that Peter Dennis tried a few years back with papers figures and rules in a book format.  Apparently those paper figures did not "take flight" so now they are trying the same figures in a different format - painted Plexiglass! 

Sometimes it takes just one figure

 

the culprit

       I have probably forty-five different armies in various scales and periods. Some I built as part of a group project, others because I was interested in a specific period. Occasionally I have built entire armies because of one sculpt. Many ages ago I spotted a pack of Pal Partha Renaissance figures hanging on the rack in a local hobby store, what really caught my eye was the magnificently sculpted horse in the little clear plastic bubble-pack. It looked like something Michelangelo might have sculpted himself.  Like all Ral Partha products is was beautifully sculpted and perfectly cast. Sadly it appears that this line is no longer in production (other Ral Partha product lines still are). I took my pack home and painted it, then I bought another, and another until I found myself in possession of an entire Swiss army. This has happened several times since, but the Swiss were the first.

anatomically the horse's neck is far to thick front to back
but it looks better than 99% of the equine models I've seen

the infantry are just as well sculpted